‘A sinking sensation’:George Orwell and the RMS <i>Titanic</i>

This paper speculatively traces the allusive and evocative presence of the sinking of the RMS Titanic in Orwell's fiction.Its cultural-historical point of departure is Orwell's memory of his response to the sinking, as outlined in his essay 'My country right or left ' (1940), and its focus is the many instances of sinking-ship imagery in Orwell's essays and novels.Situating Orwell's work in relation to contemporary accounts of the disaster from 1912 and alongside more recent academic studies of the sinking, the paper suggests alternative ways of interpreting the imagery of scuppered vessels and drowning people that appear so often in his writing.Its key claim is that the loss of the Titanic may well have been an originating, vicarious catastrophe that made Orwell into the water-fixated, sinking-ship-concerned writer he increasingly became.